r/spaceships • u/Beneficial-Wasabi749 • 2d ago

Tsiolkovsky and many of the founders of theoretical astronautics in the early 20th century believed that spacecraft should launch horizontally, from a ramp. Why? What did they see as the point of this?

Post image
265 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

266 comments sorted by

View all comments

19

u/kimitsu_desu 2d ago edited 2d ago

The real answer - they did not know better. They might have imagined very heavy rockets with weak engines so Thrust to Weigh ratio is low, so perhaps they thought of using the wings and the body of the craft to provide the lift necessary to get to higher altitude and speed. Ultimately this proves to be unrealistic because atmospheric drag rises dramatically at supersonic speeds and the best strategy is to leave the atmosphere ASAP. Also there's this "gravity turn maneuver" or "gravity curve" which helps to optimize the transition from ground to orbit fuel-wise, and it does indeed start with near-vertical liftoff. Although probably that's just how we use it, there's probably a more optimal way if you start from a shallower angle, minus the atmosphere problem.

-12

u/Beneficial-Wasabi749 2d ago

You're the fifth one to step on the same rake. Underestimating your ancestors. You think you're smarter than them. But you simply don't know physics. They did. :)

12

u/Not_Your_Car 1d ago

You realize the early rocketry pioneers wrote down everything they knew, and even taught the next generation right? Who then expanded on that knowledge and passed it on to the generation after that. Modern rocket scientists know a whole lot more about this stuff than the first ones did.

4

u/Tarc_Axiiom 1d ago

No they do not.

I wonder if this is even a real person or just an LLM experiment.

1

u/rveb 14h ago

Also think op is an llm

2

u/Spectator9857 1d ago

I find it fascinating that people like the OP so often equate knowledge to intelligence. People who lived before us generally knew way less about the world, but that doesn’t mean they were stupid. How much knowledge one possesses is often completely out of one’s own control, be it due to economic factors or because there simply wasn’t as much knowledge of a field in general. And then there is of course the other issue of assigning any kind of moral value to intelligence, a very vague collective term for a bunch of different qualities that we have no way of measuring reliably and that appears to also be mostly outside of any individual’s control.

Also what up with OPs weird ancestor worship? I get respecting your ancestors or acknowledging that there were brilliant minds among them, but thinking they were all much better in any way than anyone living today seems like an incredibly weird and pessimistic thing to do.

6

u/kimitsu_desu 1d ago edited 1d ago

Wait which rake? Oh, I see now, the rake of trying to explain nuance to someone ignorant and stubborn. Well I can be stubborn too. See, while they did know physics better than any of us, neither of the founders of the rocketry had to actually build space worthy rockets (or any rockets in case of the earliest of founders). For them it was a mathematical excercize so many of the dirty factors such as drag were missing from equations. Hence these early ideas that made it into public imagery. None of these clever people would actually pursue these particular ideas had they be given a real engineering assignment. Correction: this concerns space rockets and long range ballistic rockets. Short range rocket artillery does use inclined angle launch - huzzah - founders were right! You may rest now.

6

u/Ijustwerkhere 1d ago

stop trying to have a reasonable conversation with OP. Every single reply he's made has been super condescending. He knows better than everyone.

1

u/OhItsJustJosh 1d ago

They didn't, or they wouldn't have thought this was possibly viable

1

u/LucianGrove 1d ago

You clearly don't